Arguably Akai’s best sounding sampler. Has the sonic toughness of the S950 mixed with the crispy punch of the MPC3000. Fantastic synthesis capability as well. Pull up the default sine wave and add some very gentle pitch modulation and you’re instantly in a Boards of Canada fog.

This one is fully loaded with 32MB of RAM, which is a rare and still very expensive upgrade (look up what RAM costs for these!) as the S1000 still uses its own proprietary RAM cards, rather than the standardized PC ram used by later AKAI samplers. It has been fully serviced and upgraded in the shop here, including upgrading the display to a beautiful modern LCD unit, and the updating the internal hard drive to a fast and reliable SD-card-based solution. The 5V power supply that can fail catastrophically on these has been swapped for a modern replacement, which should be reliable, silent, and cool for years to come. With the new power supply and solid state hard drive, there is no longer a need to run the noisy fan in the back of these, so this one has been deactivated, and the machine runs cool and silent. Not shown in the photos but this one does come with a set of original factory rack ears.